The President’s top science advisors, Dr. Eric Lander and Dr. Alondra Nelson, have called for a Bill of Rights for Artificial Intelligence. In a recent commentary for Wired they drew powerful analogies with traditional areas of government regulation. “It’s unacceptable to create AI systems that will harm many people,” they wrote, “just as it’s unacceptable to […]

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This first article in a two-part series examines the fraught process of generating Oregon’s report on wireless tech’s risk in schools. The second will plumb the published research employed. As to credibility, “You only have that when you bring together the strongest voices from opposite poles. Otherwise, the outcomes are suspect. If you want to […]

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It was a defining moment, and it was also long overdue. In the summer of 2020, with the country gripped by a global pandemic that also sharpened the wealth divide of the digital economy, a congressional committee brought the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google to account. They asked why the firms, claiming to […]

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The Ratio Club was an informal dining meet-up founded in 1949 and attended by prominent British academics to discuss cybernetics—Alan Turing was a member. During the first meeting, it was explicitly noted that no sociologist was among their ranks. Omissions such as this have informed my research into the absence of sociological thinking in the […]

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Reading about artificial intelligence, one will sooner or later encounter the Turing test. It’s become a popular shorthand to measure whether AI can be said to think like humans. Computer scientist Alan Turing proposed this test—what he called the imitation game—in 1950 as a thought problem. In his proposal he sought to avoid the philosophical […]

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